GAMSTOP: Great Britain's National Self-Exclusion Scheme

One free registration, every licensed operator blocked at once. GAMSTOP is the most-used national self-exclusion scheme in the world and the reference design for the registers other regulators built after it.

How it works

A player registers once at gamstop.co.uk — name, date of birth, address, email — and chooses six months, one year or five years. Within 24 hours, every operator licensed by the Gambling Commission must block the player's accounts and new registration attempts, matched against those details. The exclusion cannot be reversed early, and when the period expires it remains in force until the player actively requests removal, with a final 24-hour cooling-off period before any access returns.

Integration is not voluntary: participation became a licence condition for all GB remote operators in 2020, so the scheme's coverage is exactly the licensed market — every site and app legally allowed to serve British customers, from the largest bookmakers to the smallest bingo brands.

What it covers — and what it does not

GAMSTOP is an online scheme: remote casino, betting, bingo and poker. It does not reach the National Lottery, betting shops (covered by the separate MOSES scheme) or land-based casinos (SENSE). Nor does it reach unlicensed offshore sites — the register's structural limit, and the reason regulators treat search results advertising "casinos not on GAMSTOP" as a consumer-protection problem in their own right. An excluded player who plays offshore has left every protection of the licensed market at once: no fund segregation, no dispute route, no exclusion.

Enforcement, not etiquette

The scheme has teeth because the Commission enforces it at the licence level. Operators whose GAMSTOP checks failed have faced regulatory settlements and refunded losses; repeated failures put the licence itself in question. For players, the practical effect is that the register works without requiring daily willpower — the system, not the person, says no.